Fox News Displays Shortcomings on Steinle Verdict Coverage

Several key Fox News personalities (Sean Hannity and Laura Ingram, among others) castigated the San Francisco jury for its acquittal of an illegal alien on murder charges.

In 2015, a young woman Kate Steinle, was shot and killed while walking along a tourist area beside the Bay.  The gun was fired by convicted felon Jose Zarate who had previously been deported from the United States five separate times. 

The Fox News commentators generally went ballistic, incredulous that the shooter hadn’t been convicted of murder (although he was convicted of illegal gun possession).  Motives for the verdict were attributed to left-wing bias, San Francisco’s “sanctuary city bias”, and sending a message of  disapproval to President Trump re his immigration policies. 

What wasn’t credited was the possibility that the jury had “reasonable doubt” as to the killer’s intent when the trigger was pulled.  That consideration is, after all, at the heart of America’s criminal justice system.  The prosecution has the burden of proof that there is no “reasonable doubt”.  If there is, the law mandates acquittal.  That’s the consequence of the legal principle that the defendant is presumed innocent unless evidence is presented which meets this level of proof.  That is the American way.

The defense was that the killing was accidental.  There was no intent to shoot the gun.  Certainly, there was no evidence of a motive, such as robbery,

Yet the conservatives’ condemnation stressed that a “bad person” who should not have been in the U.S. escaped justice.  The “sanctuary city” policy of San Francisco was responsible along with the jury.

But that view blurs a critical distinction.  Although San Francisco bears responsibility for the fact that the killing occurred (Zarate should have been in Federal custody beforehand), the defendant had the right to a trial with all the safeguards our system of justice requires.  It is certainly appropriate to blame San Francisco policies for the Steinle death.  But that doesn’t mean that her killer, even as a convicted felon with a horrible immigration record, should have been convicted of murder (requiring either intent or recklessness).

The Fox News personnel should have known better.  Some were lawyers by education who certainly did.
It would appear that for Fox News, in this instance, scoring political points mattered more than intellectual honesty.  (Or maybe the analyses were simply sloppy or ill-informed.  That’s hardly complimentary, either.)

The shame is that for fellow conservatives like me, Fox News displayed hypocrisy by engaging in distortions for which liberal outlets are rightly attacked.

That  exposes us to the criticism that “our” media is no more reliable than “theirs”.